Kids and Socks

The kids are here, the kids are here!  I am so lucky they have parents who let them come to spend time with me.  I am forever grateful.

With the kids here, there isn't space to lay out all my knitting like I usually do.  My sprawl is filled with them and their sprawl so it was a good time to pull out socks.

I found plenty of time to knit here and there through the day.  We baked cupcakes and we talked and watched a murder mystery and just spent time together.  I managed the entire heel  during the day so I feel pretty good about that.

The multi yarn is an Opal yarn, I think one of the Monet colours from their painting inspired colourways and the blue is one of the colours I used for my advent socks.  Using my usual seven and three row colour pattern, just works with this yarn combination.  It takes two colourways that I used in the last few months and makes a completely different adventure.

At the start of the year I didn't really have a plan other than wanting to knit more socks this year. I am aiming for roughly one pair a month, though I really don't need that many.  Another three or so pairs completed and I will have more than I dreamed I would do.  So far, so good.  Three down and a fourth, well under way.

Decisions

I had a marvelous weekend.  Everything but for the two spinning wheels are off to new homes and I had a really nice time chatting with the people who were making homes for my things.  I hope they enjoy and are inspired by it all.

I did knit on the Utikiek sweater.  About an inch of the last green seed stitch is done on the body.  It didn't thrill me somehow.  

What did thrill me was this scarf like thing.   

The front section of this sweater is complete.  I am measuring the length of it against a sweater of fingering weight/ sport weight yarn that I really enjoy wearing.  Yarn weight shouldn't matter but it felt like a good idea to use a sweater with similar draping qualities to determine the length.   

This is where it gets dicier.  I have started the back part.  

So far so good, but I would really like to knit the back longer than the front.  Ideally, the back piece will go to my back neckline.  I don't care for a low back of the neck on garments.  Problem is that there are 53 grams of yarn left from this skein of Silk Garden Sock yarn and I do not have another in the same colour.  It is almost enough and yet...

I have two options. Or three, I suppose.  One is to use an completely different colourway to knit the back part.  That was my original plan.  I can do this easily and have a skein set out. The thing is, I didn't think there would be so much left after completing the front.  I hate the idea of putting this lovely Noro into the leftovers bin.  It would make a great addition to any hat though or as colourwork in mittens.  

Two is to find a coordinating colour or colours from my vast selection of leftover yarns or from a different skein of Silk Garden sock, using those mid colours that ground any of Noro's blended brilliance.  I am going to dig for the other Silk Garden sock I have in my stash to see what would work.  

Three is stripes.  I could use a grey or black or one of the skeins of Silky Wool to get the length I need. I have several colours of Silky Wool that I could use as a colour extender here.  Slipping in a garter ridge of a plain colour evenly through the back would be a good alternative.

I don't know which of these ideas I will do yet, but since I am ready to go on the back, I have to decide.  

Always Knitting

Two finished sleeves.

That s what we are celebrating today. 

No ribbing at cuffs and hem is a pleasant change.  Just a nice balanced moss stitch to finish off.  The only thing I did that may have been unusual was that I doubled stranded the cast off.  The last green section is a bit shorter than all the other colour sections, but the sleeves are my perfect full length.  That perfect full length sleeve means greater chances for wear and tearing and catching on things so the doubling yarn for the cast off seemed a good idea.  

I did start on the last green section on the body of the sweater too, but my hands were done for the day.  Making that be todays work is perfectly fine.  

There are some household chores to do.  Some variation on a theme of grandkids will be here next week, for some of the days at least.  I have a few things to put away in their new places yet and a few things to go through before that chore is done. And I still have not done a big dig in my yarn.  Time to do that for sure.  But in between, always knitting.  Always knitting.

Stress Free

I was sorting and tidying in a kind of desultory way yesterday, interspersed with a bit of stress free knitting.  I just kept working along slowly on part one of this garter stitch top.

I do love watching the colours of Noro develop.  Lots of people don't like Noro because of its thick and thin, earthy rustic style but right along with colour, I love that too. It is such a glorious yarn,

When I started, I said I was going to just let the colours do their thing, but I lied.

I am right near the middle of the piece, so mid torso, and there was supposed to be this long stretch of cream that merged into green.  It went on and on and with all the other gorgeous rich color in the skein, and because of where it would fall in my garment, I decided to pull of about half of the cream section.  I am pleased with it.  

I am also hoping that more of the turquoise and purple make it into the piece.  I love that brilliance.

I am going to pull out Utkiek today and finish up the last brown section on the second sleeve.  After that, only green in a moss stitch remains and a neck finish.   I am looking forward to seeing this one done.  

Quiet Things

I am officially pooped.  I have always hated the business of selling things and selling my spinning stuff is no exception.

Today I am going to clean and sort my sewing room and then I will play in yarn.  I meant to do that on Monday but listing all the things I wanted to sell took so much longer than I thought it would and the response was so much faster and more intense.  I still have the wheels but I am not worried.  They will go in time.  The drum carder remains but there is a line up of people wanting it so I am pretty sure it will be gone shortly.

 Right now I am going to go sip my coffee and think on small things and quiet spaces and good books.  

     

The Sale Post

This is it.  The ads for my equipment are up on Kijiji and are available as follows:

Louet Victoria spinning wheel

Louet S51

These are available through Kijiji.  Contact me there.  

And a few more bits available here.  Contact me at canadianneedles@yahoo.ca if you are interested.

Please contact me at canadianneedles@yahoo.ca if you are interested in anything listed here.  Items will be removed as they are sold.  

Pickup is in Mundare east of Edmonton. I no longer have a car and cannot really deliver or mail. If any of these items remain in May, they will be sold at the Mundare townwide garage sale.  Books remaining at that time will go to the library book sale for their fundraising.   

   

Unpopular Knitting Opinions

On Ravelry and on Youtube, my two main sources of other people knitting content, there are occasionally threads and vlogs about unpopular knitting opinions. I take these tongue in cheek as I am hoping you will here too.

When I started knitting to finish a colour and get it out of the way on all parts of the sweater before moving on to the next color, who knew I would be doing something amazing.

Sleeves are sometimes seen as the tedious bit before you get a sweater.  Sleeve Island is a familiar thing to many knitters.  I am here today to say nay.  

(Unpopular opinion rearing its head)

I love knitting sleeves! After that long row of knitting across the body of the sweater, sleeve knitting is really marvelous. It goes so quick and with a pattern such as this, it is hypnotic.  

    

(End of unpopular knitting opinion.)

I don't actually believe knitting opinions need to be popular or unpopular.  How we feel about certain things in knitting is entirely our own. The term just makes me smile as I think it does most people.  I am pretty sure it is meant to.  This is our hand work.  We can take it and it can take us wherever we choose to go.  There are no knitting police.  Our choice of needles and hooks, what we make using them, what yarn we use,  all those things are ours to decide.  It is the action of our hands, the thrill of making that unite us.     

I have one pattern repeat to finish and this sleeve is done.  It took almost no time to knit last evening and it was hard to make myself stop.  I had to because one finger was trigger locking, but not to the point of pain. That actually means that I went on a bit too long so I am going to sit a day out to let the tendons heal.  

That is okay.  I will stash dive.  It is time to do that for the health and well being of my stash.  I may also pull out certain yarns for knitting some summer like things.  We shall see.  

Oops.  I almost forgot to say there was other knitting besides the sweater.  Sock knitting has been my warm up knitting in the morning the last few days.  

I need something plain, with no thinking needed before coffee in the mornings and this blue and green combination makes me happy.  Starting a day with happy is the nicest thing.

So off I go, diving deep into the yarn.  With a second coffee to make sure I am really awake.

Noro is the perfect way to end a day.

Because I am an adult, I picked up Utkiek and sorted it out.  

But only because I am an adult. All that adulting did not make me happy to have to do it, but it was nice to be past it. I find I have to be really careful checking the counting.  It is so easy to just count to four when the patterns says count to three and then do something.

I did work on it for a good chunk of the day too, and made good progress.  I should be able to get to the end of this colour on the body today and maybe even get to start of a sleeve. After that, all that remains from the overfull bag of yarn that I started with is green.  

I love this part of the progress of a garment.  You remember the pile of yarn you started with and here you are, with just a few skeins remaining. All it was was a pile of string wound into a ball, and you turned that pile into something else.  Magic. Pure magic.

 After supper, I picked up the Noro again.  It is such a calming thing to work on, just knit, knit, knit across the row and back   

 

letting the wonderful colours of Noro happen.  I do love Noro, even the weird sections.  It's a good way to end a knitting day.

I am reading Richard Osman's fourth Thursday Murder Club mystery, The Last Devil to Die, at the moment.  I recommend the whole series. They are extremely well written and in the world of the lighter end of crime fiction, that is something to be treasured. I love books that make me laugh out loud and touch my heart at the same time.  Long may he write more.

Time out

Utkiek and I are not speaking to one another at the moment.  It isn't the sweaters fault, nor the yarns.  

No.  The fault lies solely with the knitter.  She cannot count.  

The little brick pattern is 3 knits and one slip stitch.  Sounds easy, right?  It would be if she actually did three knits and then a slip rather than four knits and a slip.  The first two sets were done right but this third tier of bricks is off.  I have to rip out the two and a half rows that I have completed.

Sigh.   

There are times when you know you just have to listen to that voice inside your head that says 'Step away from the knitting."  You know that if you don't do what it says, you will mess up everything.  I listened and searched for other knitting.

I thought about going back to a sock, but decided that might be too complicated.  So I did this.

Looks like a scarf but it is going to be a t shirt in the line of this pattern from Noro Knitting Magasine Spring Summer 2013 or Recalibrate .  

I'm going to wing it for this top.  I love the shape of the top and the way the colours flow, but I don't like the width of the center panel of the Noro Top and I don't like the gauge of Recalibrate.  So, I am aiming for a top like them, but my own way.  

The happy thing is this part is Noro, always nice to work with and secondly, if I get bored of the top or garter stitch, I will have a scarf that can be sewn together to form a cowl.

Next!

And done that colour!

Its a good thing that I used the slightly darker colour to help stretch the natural fleece colour.  This is all that remains from both.

At the end of this project, I ought to have enough of my Lett Lopi stash left for mittens or a hat but that is all.  These two will be nice for bits of colour work in them.

And on to the last of the colour and texture sections but for the last greens.  

This part of a sweater is sometimes a bit tedious.  All those long rows can feel like there is nothing going on, but the texture and the changes of colour are keeping this entire garment fun and engaging.  Its been a great project for winter.

It's all Magic

I cannot explain the weekend to you.  After all that good knitting on Friday, Saturday and Sunday were even better. 

By Sunday morning, I was on the heel of sock two.

And very shortly, I had a finished pair. Gauge on foot two is a tiny bit tighter than on sock one.  It was all the racing! 

I put them on immediately.  That is my favourite part of socks:  putting them on.  Slipping on a new sock that fits your feet exactly. A handknitted sock bespoke, cups your heel, snuggles around your foot and ankle.  There is just nothing like it.  It is the closest thing to a hug from your grandchildren or your kids only for your feet.  All kinds of goodness in a small thing you made out of a kind of string.

This is what is left of the Kroy, so I can get at least another pair of socks out of it.  

I reached to put it away in the bag of various sock yarns I keep near the WIPs bin, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. It was just a flash of blue and green 

but I knew that was the next good sock.  I didn't even have to dig for needles.

My little notions box is stuffed with needles for socks.  In the blink of an eye, this happened.

And so it goes.  

Socks have cast a spell on me again.  The thing is there was lots of other knitting.  There should have been knitting on ongoing sweaters but I did not touch Utkiek all weekend.  I didn't even touch Linger.  I did play a bit with this sweater,

which really is the perfect thing to knit in March, with it's brilliant yellow and summer greens and blues.  And yet, I did not knit on it.  

I took another path and grabbed a bag of yarn ready for knitting and sat down to play needle ploys and gauge games to get ready to start another project.    

Today I will be responsible and work on Utkiek.  I am getting excited for it the closer I get to finishing.  

I feel just as if I were a squill or grape hyacinth ready to burst out of the ground and pop open in the sunlight and show off my wares.  I am ready to flower and grow in the sunshine in warm corners where even now, the ground is starting to peek out.   Winter is almost done and everything is about to awaken and I just can't wait.  

Wow Kroy. Why didn't you tell me.

A cheery picture of how I am dressed this morning.  

Plus I have the hat I just made on. ( I might need to become a hat knitter.  It is getting a lot of indoor wear.)  The sweater is a pullover using a melding of Undercurrent from Knitty.com and Romy from Ankestrick made with Fleece Artist Thicket.  It is one of the comfiest warmest things I have ever knit.  It does not match at all with the brilliant red dickie or the red and grey hat and I do not care one bit.  I am cozy and that is the point of the products of knitting.  To be warm. Mine at least.

I was sick of socks yesterday, so what could I do?  I started a new pair of course.

I am making this pair with a double strand of Patons Kroy, aiming for a pair of standard looking work socks.

 

How did I not know this magic?  Double stranded Kroy is the most delicious snuggly thing!  It's just amazing.  I will be using Kroy like this again. Just cushy.

Work socks is very much part of what drew me to make all the Sock Monkey Cabin Blankets.  I remember this kind of socks as what my dad wore in his work boots.  I can remember folding them and pairing them while helping mom to put laundry away. I remember the good wool kind and how the old kind of nylon (or possibly acrylics?) used to get hard with wear on the heels and toes.  

I know now that it was the colours that interested me.  I still find that the pairing of grey, red and white is one of my favourite things.  Every time I see that combination of colours, I get excited.  

This morning as I got ready to watch the F1 qualifying, my new sock looked like this. 

And now, just at the end of qualifying, an hour later, I am starting the heel flap. 

Socks knit with double stranded Kroy go fast.  Yet another reason to like it.

And sometimes knitting is a pain

As much as I love knitting, sometimes knitting is a pain.  

Take this sock.  And this sock yarn.

 I love this yarn.  It is Cotton Fun from Meilenweit and has been in my stash forever.  It is a blend of cotton, wool and nylon, now discontinued.  I loved the feel of it in my hands and for high summer makes great socks, warm but not too warm.

As much as I love it, I am having a bugger of a time with the knitting of this yarn.  All the patterns I have tried with it are fine, but become tedious after a very short time and I end up avoiding working on them.  I am finally doing it all properly and yet, I am disliking every second I am working on it.  It might be time to dig into the sock yarn bin and see what more interesting stuff I can find.  Or it might be time to pull out one of the other socks that are already on the needle.  I am not too worried about it though.  I have already completed two pairs of socks since Christmas.  These are going to the bottom of my want to knit pile for a good time out.

Today I am going to knit with joy.  I am almost done section three of the little squares pattern 

and guess what?  I will not run out of yarn.  Not even close.  I have just started the second skein of the cream so there will be lots.  If I run out of anything, it will be the darker colour.  

So back to work on this one.  Hoping to get to the next colour today.

To Knit is Joy

Since I moved my yarn out of the closet, some really interesting things have happened.  I am thinking about my stashed yarns more and they just excite me.  I was thinking about a particular yarn when I went to sleep last night and I awoke this morning and just felt so energized.  I was knitting before coffee and breakfast.  Knitting beats the morning news every single time.

I worked on the sweater yesterday.  My hands simply took me there and there was not a lot I could do to stop it.  I really love this small square pattern I am working.  It is just so right for this sweater.  Part of what makes it so good is that the little squares are three stitches and four rows of alternating knits and purls.  The sleeve sections are six bocks long, so I know exactly how much knitting is left.  It feels just like when I knit a seven row stripe sock. It is the most exciting thing to be able to go full tilt on a project. And I am pretty sure that I am going to keep working on it till the sweater is done.

 

  

It's starting to look like a whole sweater now.  It's going to be a very good day.

Faye asked about colours.  For this sweater, the driving force was stash.  It was what I had left from my Hun sweater.  

I loved the colours of the original Hun and sort of followed the lights and darks of that. 

I spent a lot of time choosing but River City Yarns (where I was working and where I most often shopped) had only a very few colours left of the Lett Lopi so I picked from what they had in stock.  They were very similar colours to the yarns I used for Brian's vest, though I used Cascade 220 for that.  

You can see, it isn't a very adventurous palette.  I wanted very soft colours, heathered and of the earth.  Forest colours, because Brian was that sort of man. 

I do use a trick that a friend from the yarn store used when she was choosing colours.  If you look in a mirror with all the colours held together, you will know if they are right. 

The other well known trick is to take a picture and then take all the colour out of it.  You can easily see which ones are not quite right if you do that.  If it is all too much the same grey, try different shades of the same colour till each colour is defined but matches in the greyed picture.

My last trick is a personal one. Most colours work together.  I always look to nature.  There are ten thousand greens and they all look right in nature. If it makes you feel good, go with it.

Black

Sleeve two continues apace.  

I am actually at four complete sets of the squares but I wanted to show you what is happening to the yarns on the needles.   If you  look at the knit stitch sections you can see the darker yarn clearly.  On the purl sections, the darker yarns impact is split by a bit of the lighter colour. That wee bit of a spread between helps to blend making the overall effect mottled and muted.  I am really quite pleased.

I am not sure if I will work on the Utkiek sweater today.  I might opt for a lighter weight t shirt.  I really would like to have this for summer and if I don't start working on it, it will never be finished.   

The other big news here is sofa slip covers.

I bought a loveseat and chair after coming to Mundare.  My other furniture just did not fit the room.  I went with the lovely bright yellow and mustard checked covers that Ikea had at the time. That light fabric showed every bit of dirt and had to be washed often.  I would still have them but the fabric was wearing on the loveseat arms. The threads were breaking leaving a large damaged area.  At first I was going to do some embroidery to hide the damaged area and to stabilise the fabric, but the other arm was also disintegrating.  

I looked at covers from various manufacturers but the prices were beyond what I wanted to pay.  Most places would have cost as much as a new Ikea sofa for just the covers.  I looked at new sofas for a long time but that too, was more money than I wanted to invest in furniture.  I did find a few less pricey replacement cover makers but it still would have been about 700 dollars.  

I looked at sewing them myself. I could take the pattern from the current covers and sew them.  I priced out various fabrics including denim and realized that the price was in a range I would pay, but I would have to do all the work and I am not certain my machine could do it.  While I was thinking about this option, I decide to see what other generic covers were available.  

And voila.  I managed to find covers designed to fit my sofas in the same price range as if I made them myself, through Amazon.  I jumped on it.  The fabric is not the heaviest but is at least as good as Ikea's cotton.  It is a polyester and the seams look well sewn.  They are at least as well made as I could have done on my own with none of the endless work of flinging heavy covers about.  Not perfect but I can live with them.  

They are rather dramatic though.  I chose the very dark for posterity (Keith is going to be stuck with all my stuff eventually) and the dark will be much more effective at hiding stains and spills and spots from kids and grandmothers goofing around.  And coffee spills.  It makes sense though the colour is very dominating.  It is going to take some getting used to.  It looked more navy online but it is what it is and I am long past the phase where I need perfection. What it needs is a blue and white blanket draped artfully over the back.  

And I am working on that.  

Enough for today.  I am midway through a doc on Paleolithic life in China.  Time now to go off and watch the rest of it while doing my workouts and then I can get down to knitting and seeing what will happen on one or the other sweaters today.

What happens while using Lett Lopi stash

I finished the green section and I am so pleased with how it looks.  The body section used less than I thought it might and this is what is remains of the green Lett Lopi stash. Maybe enough?

Next Colour?

I think I will do the same as I did on top:  lighter colour first.  The sweater has a slight A line shape so I will need a bit more yarn at the bottom.

I have only two skeins of the cream which may be a bit short. I am going to try to see if I can extend it.

The slightly darker skein is the leftovers from the top section.  I am going to knit a row every so often in that colour to extend the cream.  Will it work?  Who knows.

It is also time to pick a new stitch pattern.  I spent a couple of hours searching and thinking about it. I really need to use less yarn and I want to blend the little darker yarn in seamlessly as possible. I ended up picking a little block pattern and I think it is working. 

Sleeve one done. I am knitting the first round with the darker yarn and that seems to be working marvelously.  I was worried it would look striped and it doesn't.  It is visible but it blends in well.  Mission accomplished.  Sleeve two today.

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. " Horace Walpole

One of my sons said " You have too many Youtube subscriptions" the other day.  And he is right.  I do.  I wish there was a way to organize them.  I have subscriptions about history, art, knitting, fibre art,  miniatures, remodeling, F1 (naturally), natural sciences, cooking, cooking history, mudlarking and quite a few more.  There is so much out there.

I have been watching a lot of art documentaries lately.  I have always been interested in art and art history.  It is just part and parcel of my love for history and who we were then.  This led me to some really interesting stuff. 

 This weekend I watched a doc called Brushstroke.  It is a second documentary on British artist, Mary Cane-Honeysett, who loved bricks.  Last weekend, I happened on her son's Emmy winning documentary about her, Royal Academy .  It was watching that which led me to Brushtroke.  .  The art world would call her style naive, but if that is so, it is the kind of art that touches me, that touches something deep in ordinary people with routine lives and says so much of the human condition.  It may not be the the taste of the so called great artists of our day, but it is to me.  I really enjoyed both docs and have to say, I have fallen in love with her work and with her.  What an interesting person.

I also watched a couple docs from Andrew Milson channel, a permaculture teacher.  Everything there is fascinating and I highly recommend.  And if you have never watched her, Q's Greenland.  Entirely fascinating and illuminating, one minute at a time.

And then I found the ARTE.tv documentary channel.  So many good things. This is a German French broadcast channel but all the docs I have watched so far are well captioned.  I highly recommend Pullover Island.  Trust me.  You will enjoy it.

 

So Many Good Things

F1 is back.  This is the first race weekend of the season and I am giddy for it.  Because the race is in Bahrain and because F1 is catching up with what international racing ought to mean for host nations, the race will happen Saturday.  That means qualifying is today.  I have just a bit of time between our delayed watching of practice three and the beginning of the qualifying broadcasts.  

I knit a lot yesterday.  

And I will knit a lot today.  Racing. 

One thing I can tell you is that this particular pattern is eating yarn at a huge pace.  I used one full skein on the sleeves.  There is only a couple rows left on this current skein and I will need at least a full skein of it, and possibly a bit of another to get the width of stripe I want.   

I allotted two skeins for this section.  That's a bit of a problem.  I have to get another stripe of green at the very bottom and my plan was to get the ribbing out of it too.  I don't think that will happen.  

I do have two single skein of Lett Lopi, one black, one rust.  I wasn't planning to use them but if I need to, I will.  I wanted this sweater to be knit with stash only so if the ribbing is green with a bit of black and rust, that will be okay. 

It's sort of fun playing a game like this.  Sometimes working within a strict boundary can be very interesting.  I want only stash in this sweater.  I have lots in this batch of yarn for a complete sweater if I use it right.  I wanted wide stripes of texture, just like the pattern. I love the look of the design for just this that, over the Douglas Cardi, which was so popular this past year, and I love how the Lett lopi is creating the same crisp look that the pattern has. So many good things are happening.